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1) Do not use Flash for navigation. Or if you do, be sure to provide some alternate means of navigating as well. No one should have to download plug-ins just to navigate the site.

2) Keep your page size down. Most users are still behind modems. As a corollary, don't use graphics just to have graphics; put them there with a purpose in mind.

3) Make your pages validate. Just a quick run through Tidy will fix this up for you. I'm not saying you necessarily have to use structure HTML (I think you [i]should, [/i]but that's not as important as plain old validation). The Slash authors would do well to take this one to heart.

4) Don't open any new windows, except in response to clicking links, and only do this very sparingly. Popups are annoying.

5) Automatic music = BAD. Embed music if you want, but provide a PLAY, and more importantly, a STOP button. This means no using the evil IE-specific BGSOUND tag.

6) Unless you're trying to show off your m@d j@\/A$kr1p7 $k1Llz, don't use it unnecessarily. Be particularly careful with dialog bozes and alerts.

7) Visit AnyBrowser, A List Apart, and the old WebStandards.org sites. While these latter two sometimes miss the point of standards-compliance (it's not just about neat tricks, though you certainly can do these), it's important to at least get the page legible in anything you throw at it, even if the design doesn't look right in some of them. In the end, design is nice, but the information is what's really important.

7) Speaking of that last one, don't let the design get in the way of your information. Grey text on a white background is a Bad Idea. So is anything that's blinking. And so on, and so forth.

There's a huge split. If you ask the "Slashdot Community" what makes good web design, you'll hear... a lot of noise.

There's the progress camp:
www.webstandards.org, that wants everyone to upgrade their browsers and live on the bleeding edge of style sheets (how ironic is it that their bleeding edge stance has been replaced with an "under construction" sign).

Then there's the compatibility camp:
anybrowser.org that wants every web page to work in the old browsers.

There are probably a few things everyone can agree on, like Flash being worthless at best and extremely annoying most of the time.

Personally, I say: look at the successful dynamic sites. Google, Yahoo, Slashdot. Light HTML, very light images, strong dynamic backend. Don't get too caught up in the format details; it's the power of what's driving the web page, and the content, that matters.

I’d better answer this one, as I started the discussion. Thanks, afidel, for raising the web standards issue.

Actually, I wasn’t referring to how Mozilla renders particular websites. I think web standards are important, and I’m broadly in favour of the Browser Upgrade initiative. The sooner we can banish table layout hacks (and worse) the better. Mozilla is a website developer’s dream from that point of view.

My issue is with the unsatisfactory way that Mozilla renders certain fonts and certain glyphs. I refer in particular to bug number 86563, which is about the incorrect rendering of ’, ” and „. I had this problem on my system (MDK 8.1). In this context, “properly” means displaying the correct glyph— fairly fundamental really. There was a great deal of discussion of the problem on bugzilla, which finally cumulated in it being closed as “WORKSFORME”. Except that it doesn’t. You really need to read the full discussion.

(I take back my earlier remark about Helvetica being substituted for certain truetype fonts. It appears that it may only affect symbol-type fonts, which are not really within the web standards.)

I’d still like to see antialiasing of the quality found in Konqueror though.

P.S. My own workaround was to completely remove support for iso8859-13 character sets from my system by editing some of the FreeX86 configuration files. Ok for me, as I don’t need the Baltic Rim characters set. But it is not the kind of thing you can expect Joe User to know how to do. It took me several days to figure it out.

this is something my clients (and, however unfortunately) my fellow developers have failed to grasp of late. yes, there is demand for a lot of information, and yes, it should look pretty, but that doesn't mean using seventeen tables for your page layout. you've tapped into a vein here that is worth exploring, because the message is so similar to the web standards project's hiatus claim: the problem no longer lies with the browsers (or in this case, the bandwidth and access providers) but the developers who cling to out-of-date methods to create sites.

this is the next step in thinning the herd, i guess, and improving by virtue of smallest and fastest becomes biggest and best.

imho.

ecd.
"Who puts gum on a roof??" - the tick

Don't assume that most webmasters are too lazy to code their pages for anything other than IE. The real problem is once a non-standard buggy piece of crap browser like NS 4.x enters the marketplace, webmasters must support it or risk alienating users from their websites. I always end up having to code twice just so things like layer effects work on NS browsers as well as IE.

Geez, what's with all this IE bashing? Every version of Internet Explorer (past 3.0) are all incredible browsers. Version 4.0 does alpha blending, DHTML, layers, etc. and did it way before Netscape coughed up their pitiful non-standard methods of achieving a fraction of what's possible in IE. Even an organization that has continued to bash IE repeatedly for deficiencies in its compliance with W3C standards (www.webstandards.org) admits that, "Microsoft's implementation of CSS1 has thus far always been the best available..."

Don't assume that most webmasters are too lazy to code their pages for anything other than IE. The real problem is once a non-standard buggy piece of crap browser like NS 4.x enters the marketplace, webmasters must support it or risk alienating users from their websites. I always end up having to code twice just so things like layer effects work on NS browsers as well as IE.

Geez, what's with all this IE bashing? Every version of Internet Explorer (past 3.0) are all incredible browsers. Version 4.0 does alpha blending, DHTML, layers, etc. and did it way before Netscape coughed up their pitiful non-standard methods of achieving a fraction of what's possible in IE. Even an organization that has continued to bash IE repeatedly for deficiencies in its compliance with W3C standards (www.webstandards.org) admits that, "Microsoft's implementation of CSS1 has thus far always been the best available..."

Its true: of the 4% of the total people who goto my website who use netscape, 89% of them are using netscape 4. UGH!

Netscape still to this day has problems with rendering wc3 validated sites. I cannot even imagine what 4 must be doing.

Zeldman & Co. Broswer upgrade initive

Wasp reacts to the RAND policy, check it out!

*Yawn*

Ok, you're turn.

Um, check with WASP. IE for Mac fully supports CSS 1 and HTML. Since you don't believe me, here.

IMHO, having bandwidth intensive applications on your website not only isolates your from reaching a large portion of your user base, but it also tells me that you haven't done something correctly. Even Flash, as complicated as it can be, is a very compact data format relative to MPEG, QuickTime, or other multimedia formats. Pretty pictures tend to distract the user from what they are at the page for in the first place. This isn't to say that media intensive sites don't have a place, for they do. But only in a limited set of circumstances.

My rules for designing good websites are:

Make em standards compliant

Make em work on different browsers on different platforms. Incompatible with the first point, but there we are.

They only have content that is necessary to the purpose of the site

I assume that Dvorak's audience here is web designers. If so, he's telling us nothing we didn't aleady know. (And if you're reading Dvorak for tips on web design, then, umm, go here instead. You'll be better served.) The net is still (thank Buddha) primarily a text-based medium. Even on high speed connections it takes a significant amount of time to download multimedia content. It's just simple politeness not to require your users to download that crap unless they request it. But even if broadband does become universal, the Right Thing To Do(TM) will still be to make pages that are as lean as possible, for simple reasons of maintainability and professionalism.

If, on the other hand, you have no multimedia on your site and it takes longer than 8 secs to load on a 28.8 connection, you should probably be reconsider your design choices and/or toolset. Throw GoLive out the goddamn window & get one book on HTML & one on JavaScript, k?

(BTW: I saw Princess Mononoke for the 1st time last night. 5-stars, friends! Ck it!)

Delightful.

Funny how a browser made by a company which (despite inventing the graphical browser, JavaScript, and basically everything that browsers remain to be today) has no income because a monopolistic operating system company has enough money to make browsers free for as long as it takes to kill its competition, is still the most compliant browser available (NS6/Mozilla).

When IE6 comes out in, like a year from now, it will be the browser we should have had four years ago.

The standards are already here to do it.
All it require is people like you to get off your ass and learn/use them. And places like slashdot to support these kinda things... Instead of shunning them.
Yes, maybe the browser re-direction was a little harsh. But if anyone accutaly bother to read the artical. They would have knowen that there where other ways the were suggested that were way more suttle.

So, really, there are no new standards for all these things. The standards are already there, and have been there for quite sometime. So don't try and shift the blame. It's there, you just too lazy to do anything about it. And so do the slack browser companies, although, the do seem to be getting the message.

"It would be better if websites could be more focused, so that bandwith use by individual pages could be more limited, or at least so that coding could be more focused. "

CSS2, XML/XHTML, look for them on www.w3c.org

Take all that anger and do something constructive with it: webstandards.org
Down with crap-ass workarounds!

"Smear'd with gumms of glutenous heat, I touch..." - Comus, John Milton

From what I've heard, MSIE on Macintosh is the most standard-compliant browser out there, which is not easy to do.

This is not about graphic design. It's about the separation of style from content, which will allow us to do amazing things. Like redesign an entire site in hours instead of months. Stop authoring and debugging stupid, browser-specific markup. And support non-traditional browsers, from Palm Pilots(TM) to Braille readers, without building multiple versions of every page. All pretty good stuff.

Also, they make it clear that his move isn't for everyone. IE, big sites like yahoo and amozon. But they could still have a little link instead of redirecting.

In case you did hear me in a previous post, or didn't see the quote above. They are trying to make the web more acessable. Not trying to make sure that people can see neat/cool/flashy sites.

Maybe you should check out the following:

www.w3.org
www.webstandards.org
www.alistapart.com

http://www.webstandards.org/ gets a frowny face from the HTML validity checker in my current primary browser, iCab.

More specifically, it reports "Error: The defined widths of table cells are not consistent." The problem seems to be a width="25" in one of the td tags, which should be width="25%" to match the other rows.

I think if more browsers adopted an always-there error-checking interface like iCab's (a small face icon that is either a smiling green or frowning purple; clicking on it produces a detailed error report) then there would be a lot more pressure on developers to produce decent HTML. It is amazing how few web pages actually get it to smile.

BTW, /.'s HTML gets a much longer error report with its frowny face.

Gee that really ticked me off.
--

What are you talking about? If anything, moving to fully CSS compliant browsers (and thus using fully CSS-ed pages) would be beneficial for the handicapped. CSS pages are much easier to convert to plain text and they don't suffer all the junk mark-up that we see with HTML.

I would also direct you to the relevant section in the Educational FAQ of the WSP about how uptake of web standards will increase accessibility to all.

Umm, if you'd looked at the pages you might have seen that one of the reasons for the proposal was to allow the full use of CSS to seperate the style from the content, in order to help address accessability. You might take a look at the links
on the tips for developers page there, connecting to the W3C accessability guidelines and the Bobby accessability validator.

here (Mozilla screwed that up, not me. Honestly!)

In related news it seems that the WaSP have changed their minds about Netscape 6.

In related news it seems that the WaSP have changed their minds about Netscape 6.

... also gives many reasons on why standards compliance in Web browsers is important to preserve the independence and accessibility of the WWW.

>>> http://www.webstandards.org/

A lot of people are complaining that Amaya isn't as nice or as comfortable as Mozilla or IE. These people are missing the point of Amaya.

Amaya isn't supposed to replace your current web browser, it's a reference implimentation. Its goal is to show how a web browser should render a page. The idea is that if Amaya renders your web page correctly, then your HTML is Correct(tm).

If you don't understand why web standards are important, check out the Web Standards Project.

--

Always was until IE 5.0. NS 6.0 is more standards compliant than IE 5.5. Why all the bad press. Why doesn't this guy blast IE?

Microsoft gets bashed regularly by standards groups such as WaSP. But it's very possible that Microsoft is not supporting standards for political reasons. Mozilla's purpose, on the other hand, is to fully support standards. Worse yet, some of these issues have been addressed by engineers, but Netscape won't allow the patches to be included with 1.0. That's the kicker.

- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson

The same people who are saying that Netscape 6 shouldn't be released because it isn't standards compliant are the same people who just recently said that Netscape should've released an interim browser between 4.7x and 6.x that at least implemented some standards.

The complaints yesterday were about Netscape not including standards compliance bug fixes which are in Mozilla because NS6 is in the push to RTM (release to manufacturing). I don't think that criticism was entirely fair - NS have to draw the line somewhere or they'll be bug fixing for the next 3 years.

My opinion of the project is that they shouldn't have tried to do everything at once. They should've finished the browser before starting the mail reader, then once that was done move onto the composer, and so on. I also don't agree with their decision to write their own UI toolkit, rather than just an abstraction layer on top of the existing toolkits. (Apparently it was the only way they could sell marketing/management on supporting anything other than Windows).

The WSP is the Web Standards Project. They've posted a criticism of MozillaZine's criticism of Flanagan's original criticism.

The WSP is the Web Standards Project. They've posted a criticism of MozillaZine's criticism of Flanagan's original criticism.

The Mozillazine rant makes no sense. David Flanagan says Netscape 6 should be as good as Mozilla's best, not compromised by marketers. Instead of realizing that Flanagan is supporting the efforts Mozilla has made, Mozillazine goes into Nixon enemies mode. And trashes the WaSP while they're at it. I intended to reply on Mozillazine, but it's down. Here's the WaSP reply to Mozillazine.

Just to make it clear, IE MacOS has almost as much in common with IE winX than win98 has with win2000. They just are different products distributed under the same name.

First, they can't use most of the same code base (due to the VERY strong ties between IE and Windows on the win side), for example a whole bunch of javascript don't work on IE MacOS (*.print for example).

2, the MacOS IE team did an almost complete rewrite of IE between vers. 4.5 and 5.0

3, feature wise both are not in the same league. You have control on what you print on IE mac (bg color, size, etc...), you have a page holder on the side (überKool feature), etc...

4, standard wise they're equally not in the same league, as IE Mac has COMPLETE support for CSS-1 and HTML 4. (see http://www.Webstandards.org/macie5.txt and http://www.alistapart.com/stories/ie5m ac/ )

The mac dev. team is not even geographically near Redmond (they're in the Silicon Valley).

As for me I stick with icab; small, very fast, allows a lot of control.

WaSP is not necessarily Netscape's biggest supporter.

I should use IE or Netscape to view their site.

...which is exactly the reason that MSNBC, Netscape, Opera, Microsoft, etc. should be supporting web standards. This proprietary crap is just one big headache.

if you take a look at the experiences
the people at http://webstandards.org/
made with similar promises from microsoft
one can not be so upbeat about them
helping fix the colour problems anymore.

kind regards philippe

Netscape very definitely *does not*.

Netscape had minor issues back in the days of HTML 3.2, but they were nothing compared to IE's problems. But nowadays on the web, when more and more people are trying to get closer and closer to standards, Netscape 4.x is getting more and more revealed as the hack piece of crap it's become.

If a site doesn't work in Netscape, then 99 times out of 100 it's because of Netscape being broken, not the site.

(Take a look at http://www.alistapart.com/storie s/died/article.txt for a brief little anecdote by one of the founders of the WaSP about Netscape's troubles...)

-Jo Hunter

Microsoft doesn't support the CSS standard? Are you insane? Internet Explorer 5.5 is the most standard-compliant browser in the universe.

That's flat wrong.

Mozilla is the most standards-compliant browser in the universe.

Where is Microsoft going today?:

Title: MICROSOFT OUSTS XML EDITOR AT W3C By Maureen O'Gara

Synopsis: Microsoft wielded its terrific power to get Tim Bray, co-author of XML, the Extensible Markup Language, dismissed as the potential spec's co-editor by the World Wide Web Consortium in late June, according...
--

http://www.webstandards.org/wfw/ieah.html

http://www.webstandards.org/ie55.txt


--

Don't think I like the fact that the best browser available comes from the Borg. I lie in bed praying for the day when "ECMAScript" finally makes it into iCab. But even an anti-M$ bigot like me can recognize that Micro~1's IE/Mac team have turned out the most standards-compliant browser currently available. It's not too bloated either. And since Version 4, IE/Mac has provided the kind of cookie control that is currently such big news for IE/Windows.

If designers continue to cater to the limitations of Netscape 4 the platform will never die and exciting new technologies like CSS and DHTML will not be usable. SOMEONE has to start using those technologies first, to drive up adoption of newer browsers that support these technologies. It's not going to be yahoo.com or cnn.com, it's got to start with smaller sites like my page.

The problem with Netscape 4 is not that it doesn't support CSS (Lynx doesn't support CSS and it renders the page fine). The problem is its half-assed support for CSS. It thinks it understands CSS, but it really doesn't. If AOL/Netscape would just release a version of NS4 that flat-rendered any CSS pages the results would be much more usable. I tried to make sure the page was accessible to text based browsers as a lowest common denominator, and for visually impaired people (although not many of them play Quake I would imagine).

I know a lot of people would be happy with a web that was just black text on a white (or grey for old-schoolers) background, but some of us are intrigued by the possibility of near-pixel-perfect accuracy in web page rendering. It opens up an amazing range of creative possibilities.

There are CSS-compliant browsers available on every major platform today. If you're still using 3 year old technology (Netscape 4) perhaps you should consider upgrading. If you aren't happy with those other browsers, perhaps you should contribute to making them better.

This letter is in response to your article, "For the Good of the Web: An Open Letter to Netscape"", linked to from your front page by the words "slams Netscape".

Since I don't know the author of the article I'm responding to, and since "The WaSP" is essentially a pseudonym for the WSP leadership, I will hereafter do my best to refer to the author of the piece as either "The WaSP" or "the WSP".

"The WaSP" states, "How can standards advocates continue to point to your example while criticizing other browser makers? How can we demand that Microsoft 'do what Netscape is doing,' when, from a business perspective, 'what Netscape is doing' is bleeding market share while failing to ship product?"

This is an interesting twist of logic, but conflating your "business perspective" on Netscape's time-to-market with your goal of standards compliance, while being the only way you can support your assertions, is faulty reasoning. Unfortunately, it's the foundation for your entire piece.

The WSP's goal is promoting standards compliance, and cajoling browser makers into supporting standards, no? Where in your mission does it talk about "time-to-market" issues? Is that something we should just assume? Since the developers have started on their new code base you've been advocating Netscape's "plans" over their "products". What has changed? I assume you have just lost patience. Is it your stated role to lose patience with sincere efforts? What kind of message does that send to the browser development community? A message far worse than Netscape's lagging efforts, I fear.

Somehow you still believe that the reason for Microsoft's inability to make IE standards compliant has something to do with a lack of competition. I've read their posts in your mailing list. I know better. You do, too.

Standards have had nothing to do with Netscape's declining market share, and if you can show one statistic that says otherwise, I'd love to see it. The reason for Netscape's declining share is nothing more than Microsoft's monopoly control over the browser marketplace. I would venture that half of the "86%" of users who are using IE now have never even seen Netscape's browser. Remember, in the past two years, more and more people have come on the 'Net -- what's that percentage? half of the current Internet users? -- and the first and only application they use is IE. Even if some have made the effort to switch to Netscape, the fact remains that the integration of the IE browser into the Operating System has played more of a role in the decline in Netscape's market share than any "standards compliance" issue. To deny that is to take a myopic view of the browser wars.

The writer goes on to say, "Frankly, if we had known you could not deliver a stable, usable, standards-compliant browser in under two years, we would not have asked you to try."

Are we amazed yet? This is the same WSP that takes the credit for putting Netscape on its current course. This is the same WSP that actually has a few members (emphasis on "few") taking part in the development of Mozilla. This is the same WSP that could see every step of the progress of the browser from the opening of its source code.

It gets better. "But wasn't it your job to know whether or not you could pull this off before you pledged to do it? Estimating software delivery dates is notoriously tricky, we admit - but two whole years?"

Let's be clear. The WSP themselves has obviously underestimated the time required to produce a high quality, standards-compliant browser *suite* from scratch. (Why would Netscape produce just a Web browser and hope to compete? I'd love it if someone explained that logic to me.) The WSP underestimated what it would take to produce a browser that could run on any of the major platforms, with a limited number of developers. (Would a browser for just Windows have sufficed? Or just Mac and Windows? Are you planning on dictating the platforms Netscape should develop for, for expediency's sake?) You also didn't consider that Netscape would need true internationalization to be effective. You assumed too much. Now Netscape is paying the price for your assumptions. Shame on you, WSP.

The writer goes on, "Why are you taking forever to deliver a usable browser?"

Two years is forever in computer years, according to the piece. What has Microsoft delivered in those two years, I wonder? They reached version 4 and have coasted ever since, because they know the market is a lock. Oh, they've added plenty of proprietary features, but their CSS and DOM support is still as sketchy as in V4.

"And why," the anonymous writer continues, "if you are a company that believes in web standards, do you keep Navigator 4 on the market?"

What are they going to put in its place? A ham sandwich? There is still a significant percentage of users out there using Communicator (I'm one of them). I like bug fixes that fix security issues in the browser. That's what Netscape's point releases accomplish.

That said, the following might sound contradictory: The reason I use Communicator? Security. I cannot subject my system to running IE and Outlook. I have important data that I'm not willing to lose, and IE and Outlook are too much of a security risk. Standards be damned, if Microsoft continues to make a browser so wedded to the operating system that it puts the whole system at risk, I won't use it. There are others out in the ether who feel likewise. We should be able to have a browser that we can trust in the interim between the 4.x releases and the 6 release. To ask us to switch to Microsoft's insecure system is unrealistic. And what about Netscape's Linux users? You didn't seem to account for them.

"If you genuinely realized it would take two years to replace Netscape 4, we wish you would have told us. No market, let alone the Internet, can stand still that long. We would have told you as much."

Apparently the WSP would have told Netscape to give up. What else would you have suggested? Pushing out a non-compliant browser suite that's buggy? Turning back time and creating a product that follows your goals precisely - goals that obviously go beyond mere standards compliance?

Then, "The WaSP" rolls out a veiled threat. "...if it takes you another six months to pull this off, the world's first fully standards-compliant browser could be playing to an empty house. And the message such a failure would send is: 'Don't support standards if you want to stay in business.' If you send the world that message, you will have harmed the cause you meant to help."

Astounding. Netscape, for all its efforts to make a standards compliant browser, is now harming the cause more than it helps. The herculean effort that these developers have put into this product is now all in vain, and the WSP has turned on the countdown clock to Netscape's demise.

"Those who look more closely will realize that software development issues, not W3C standards, are to blame for the endless delays. But who looks closely in this environment? On the web, people click, scan, and go somewhere else. The perception that standards are somehow to blame is enough to cause harm."

The same people who click, scan, and go somewhere else... how exactly will they get the impression that "standards" are to blame? This mass of anonymous users that you have fashioned doesn't seem to have the wits to grasp that.

Finally, the clincher. "For the good of the web, it is time to withdraw Navigator 4 from the market, whether Netscape 6 is ready or not," says "The WaSP".

When IE supports CSS and the DOM, then Netscape should chuck NN4. Not one second before. Microsoft is just as much to blame for the standards problems the WSP is facing (and you know it), and to expect Netscape to cut their one tie to their customer base is wrongheaded and arrogant. And to ask them to do so based on the faulty logic and assumptions expressed in your piece!!!

"If you fail now, the web will essentially belong to a single company."

Don't you know, WSP? It already does. And let's make this very clear: Microsoft is wholly to blame for the possibility of a single company dominating the browser industry and the standards process. From turning the browser into a revenue-less commodity, to bundling the browser with every Windows OS shipped, Microsoft has turn after turn made competition and progress near impossible. And they have done it in the name of "customer benefit" -- the same line they've been feeding you in your mailing list as the reason why IE is not standards compliant. Do you really think that Netscape producing a standards compliant browser would make one iota of difference in the market? Even according to your piece, the masses don't know standards compliance from a hole in the ground.

Until Microsoft is forced to unbundle IE from the Operating System, and computer makers are allowed to bundle Netscape as they see fit, the desktop browser market will only get more lopsided. Even after Netscape 6 is released. Want to place a wager?

"And for once, nobody will be able to blame them for 'competing unfairly.'" Apparently because Microsoft will have no competition.

What is the impetus behind this diatribe? I suspect that the WSP has been getting criticism recently for chastising Microsoft and not Netscape. Was this piece written to even the balance a bit? It is so lacking in evenhandedness and logic that one assumes that you (the WSP) are attempting to cover up your impotence in affecting change in the browser market by placing the full onus for the problem on Netscape. The only real success story that the WSP has claimed is Netscape's shift towards a new browser and standards compliance. One would think you'd be unwilling to dismantle -- to deconstruct -- such a victory with your management opinions about time-to-market.

The WSP has taken exactly the wrong attitude. Instead of heaping scorn on Netscape (and, by association, the Mozilla effort), you should be supporting -- nay, advocating -- the standards compliance that Mozilla and Netscape 6 will bring to the market. You should be advocating for Mozilla's standards goals that you so quickly took credit for a year and a half ago.

You should be encouraging the work of the many developers who are fighting an uphill battle against a monopolist. You should be encouraging the WSP members who are putting a serious effort into the Netscape and Mozilla product.

The WSP so easily turned its back on Netscape and the Mozilla effort. Do you know what your goals really are?

Got a response? TalkBack!

This letter is in response to your article, "For the Good of the Web: An Open Letter to Netscape"", linked to from your front page by the words "slams Netscape".

Since I don't know the author of the article I'm responding to, and since "The WaSP" is essentially a pseudonym for the WSP leadership, I will hereafter do my best to refer to the author of the piece as either "The WaSP" or "the WSP".

"The WaSP" states, "How can standards advocates continue to point to your example while criticizing other browser makers? How can we demand that Microsoft 'do what Netscape is doing,' when, from a business perspective, 'what Netscape is doing' is bleeding market share while failing to ship product?"

This is an interesting twist of logic, but conflating your "business perspective" on Netscape's time-to-market with your goal of standards compliance, while being the only way you can support your assertions, is faulty reasoning. Unfortunately, it's the foundation for your entire piece.

The WSP's goal is promoting standards compliance, and cajoling browser makers into supporting standards, no? Where in your mission does it talk about "time-to-market" issues? Is that something we should just assume? Since the developers have started on their new code base you've been advocating Netscape's "plans" over their "products". What has changed? I assume you have just lost patience. Is it your stated role to lose patience with sincere efforts? What kind of message does that send to the browser development community? A message far worse than Netscape's lagging efforts, I fear.

Somehow you still believe that the reason for Microsoft's inability to make IE standards compliant has something to do with a lack of competition. I've read their posts in your mailing list. I know better. You do, too.

Standards have had nothing to do with Netscape's declining market share, and if you can show one statistic that says otherwise, I'd love to see it. The reason for Netscape's declining share is nothing more than Microsoft's monopoly control over the browser marketplace. I would venture that half of the "86%" of users who are using IE now have never even seen Netscape's browser. Remember, in the past two years, more and more people have come on the 'Net -- what's that percentage? half of the current Internet users? -- and the first and only application they use is IE. Even if some have made the effort to switch to Netscape, the fact remains that the integration of the IE browser into the Operating System has played more of a role in the decline in Netscape's market share than any "standards compliance" issue. To deny that is to take a myopic view of the browser wars.

The writer goes on to say, "Frankly, if we had known you could not deliver a stable, usable, standards-compliant browser in under two years, we would not have asked you to try."

Are we amazed yet? This is the same WSP that takes the credit for putting Netscape on its current course. This is the same WSP that actually has a few members (emphasis on "few") taking part in the development of Mozilla. This is the same WSP that could see every step of the progress of the browser from the opening of its source code.

It gets better. "But wasn't it your job to know whether or not you could pull this off before you pledged to do it? Estimating software delivery dates is notoriously tricky, we admit - but two whole years?"

Let's be clear. The WSP themselves has obviously underestimated the time required to produce a high quality, standards-compliant browser *suite* from scratch. (Why would Netscape produce just a Web browser and hope to compete? I'd love it if someone explained that logic to me.) The WSP underestimated what it would take to produce a browser that could run on any of the major platforms, with a limited number of developers. (Would a browser for just Windows have sufficed? Or just Mac and Windows? Are you planning on dictating the platforms Netscape should develop for, for expediency's sake?) You also didn't consider that Netscape would need true internationalization to be effective. You assumed too much. Now Netscape is paying the price for your assumptions. Shame on you, WSP.

The writer goes on, "Why are you taking forever to deliver a usable browser?"

Two years is forever in computer years, according to the piece. What has Microsoft delivered in those two years, I wonder? They reached version 4 and have coasted ever since, because they know the market is a lock. Oh, they've added plenty of proprietary features, but their CSS and DOM support is still as sketchy as in V4.

"And why," the anonymous writer continues, "if you are a company that believes in web standards, do you keep Navigator 4 on the market?"

What are they going to put in its place? A ham sandwich? There is still a significant percentage of users out there using Communicator (I'm one of them). I like bug fixes that fix security issues in the browser. That's what Netscape's point releases accomplish.

That said, the following might sound contradictory: The reason I use Communicator? Security. I cannot subject my system to running IE and Outlook. I have important data that I'm not willing to lose, and IE and Outlook are too much of a security risk. Standards be damned, if Microsoft continues to make a browser so wedded to the operating system that it puts the whole system at risk, I won't use it. There are others out in the ether who feel likewise. We should be able to have a browser that we can trust in the interim between the 4.x releases and the 6 release. To ask us to switch to Microsoft's insecure system is unrealistic. And what about Netscape's Linux users? You didn't seem to account for them.

"If you genuinely realized it would take two years to replace Netscape 4, we wish you would have told us. No market, let alone the Internet, can stand still that long. We would have told you as much."

Apparently the WSP would have told Netscape to give up. What else would you have suggested? Pushing out a non-compliant browser suite that's buggy? Turning back time and creating a product that follows your goals precisely - goals that obviously go beyond mere standards compliance?

Then, "The WaSP" rolls out a veiled threat. "...if it takes you another six months to pull this off, the world's first fully standards-compliant browser could be playing to an empty house. And the message such a failure would send is: 'Don't support standards if you want to stay in business.' If you send the world that message, you will have harmed the cause you meant to help."

Astounding. Netscape, for all its efforts to make a standards compliant browser, is now harming the cause more than it helps. The herculean effort that these developers have put into this product is now all in vain, and the WSP has turned on the countdown clock to Netscape's demise.

"Those who look more closely will realize that software development issues, not W3C standards, are to blame for the endless delays. But who looks closely in this environment? On the web, people click, scan, and go somewhere else. The perception that standards are somehow to blame is enough to cause harm."

The same people who click, scan, and go somewhere else... how exactly will they get the impression that "standards" are to blame? This mass of anonymous users that you have fashioned doesn't seem to have the wits to grasp that.

Finally, the clincher. "For the good of the web, it is time to withdraw Navigator 4 from the market, whether Netscape 6 is ready or not," says "The WaSP".

When IE supports CSS and the DOM, then Netscape should chuck NN4. Not one second before. Microsoft is just as much to blame for the standards problems the WSP is facing (and you know it), and to expect Netscape to cut their one tie to their customer base is wrongheaded and arrogant. And to ask them to do so based on the faulty logic and assumptions expressed in your piece!!!

"If you fail now, the web will essentially belong to a single company."

Don't you know, WSP? It already does. And let's make this very clear: Microsoft is wholly to blame for the possibility of a single company dominating the browser industry and the standards process. From turning the browser into a revenue-less commodity, to bundling the browser with every Windows OS shipped, Microsoft has turn after turn made competition and progress near impossible. And they have done it in the name of "customer benefit" -- the same line they've been feeding you in your mailing list as the reason why IE is not standards compliant. Do you really think that Netscape producing a standards compliant browser would make one iota of difference in the market? Even according to your piece, the masses don't know standards compliance from a hole in the ground.

Until Microsoft is forced to unbundle IE from the Operating System, and computer makers are allowed to bundle Netscape as they see fit, the desktop browser market will only get more lopsided. Even after Netscape 6 is released. Want to place a wager?

"And for once, nobody will be able to blame them for 'competing unfairly.'" Apparently because Microsoft will have no competition.

What is the impetus behind this diatribe? I suspect that the WSP has been getting criticism recently for chastising Microsoft and not Netscape. Was this piece written to even the balance a bit? It is so lacking in evenhandedness and logic that one assumes that you (the WSP) are attempting to cover up your impotence in affecting change in the browser market by placing the full onus for the problem on Netscape. The only real success story that the WSP has claimed is Netscape's shift towards a new browser and standards compliance. One would think you'd be unwilling to dismantle -- to deconstruct -- such a victory with your management opinions about time-to-market.

The WSP has taken exactly the wrong attitude. Instead of heaping scorn on Netscape (and, by association, the Mozilla effort), you should be supporting -- nay, advocating -- the standards compliance that Mozilla and Netscape 6 will bring to the market. You should be advocating for Mozilla's standards goals that you so quickly took credit for a year and a half ago.

You should be encouraging the work of the many developers who are fighting an uphill battle against a monopolist. You should be encouraging the WSP members who are putting a serious effort into the Netscape and Mozilla product.

The WSP so easily turned its back on Netscape and the Mozilla effort. Do you know what your goals really are?

Got a response? TalkBack!

You might want to take a look at:

http://www.webstandards.org/wfw/ieah.html

The WSP has criticized Microsoft, but Netscape's non-delivery makes it harder to do that.

It's funny because in this press release, they flamed Microsoft for IE 5.5. Okay - so, they don't like IE, they don't like Navigator - WHAT BROWSER _DO_ THEY LIKE? What the hell does this group do? Fuss at everybody because they don't support standards? From what I can tell, they don't really do anything. They aren't publishing any documents, they aren't on any standards boards, they don't sponsor any conferences or any training sessions - they don't do anything! Time to get out the Raid bug spray...

Actually, WSP has said positive things fairly recently: http://www.webstandards.org/macie5_03 2700.txt

I fail to see why I should "unfix" my page when it follows the standards to the letter. I refuse to write poorly constructed HTML which will work only with some browsers. The webstandards people have even said that IE fails with proper HTML. (More information about frustration with working about browser implementations here)
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Maybe we should all boycot IE. Not hard to do for Linux users, since [almost] all linux users use NS. But if we got support from WaSP and maybe made it easier for people to download alternative browsers, such as NS and opera, we might have more support from all of those Windows users out there.

What happened with the /A>? They were petitioning Microsoft to support the rest of the standard before moving on. Have they failed (not that they haven't tried and tried hard)? Well, at least they're mad about it as well.

And why isn't Microsoft implementing the rets of the standard. Is it really thatmuch more thna what they've already accomplished? Perhaps Big Daddy Gates is pushing the .NOT^H^H^HNET initiative too hard?

So what can we do about it? WSP has not worked thus far. Why should a big behemoth like Microsoft bow down to them? Can we sue Microsoft for one reason or another related to not supporting standards? If so, what does that say for every less-standardly-implemented browser out there?

I think I'll take up farming until this whole thing blows over.

What happened with the /A>? They were petitioning Microsoft to support the rest of the standard before moving on. Have they failed (not that they haven't tried and tried hard)? Well, at least they're mad about it as well.

And why isn't Microsoft implementing the rets of the standard. Is it really thatmuch more thna what they've already accomplished? Perhaps Big Daddy Gates is pushing the .NOT^H^H^HNET initiative too hard?

So what can we do about it? WSP has not worked thus far. Why should a big behemoth like Microsoft bow down to them? Can we sue Microsoft for one reason or another related to not supporting standards? If so, what does that say for every less-standardly-implemented browser out there?

I think I'll take up farming until this whole thing blows over.